HILLARY HECKLER HAS ENOUGH STAR POWER ON THE RIGHT TO BE A PRESENCE FOR A LONG TIME

Hillary Clinton was heckled in Derry, New Hampshire, yesterday by a state representative and conservative activist:

Hillary Clinton bluntly addressed a Republican state representative heckling her about Bill Clinton's alleged sexual impropriety on Sunday in New Hampshire, telling the woman she was "very rude."

When Clinton began taking questions at a Derry town hall, Katherine Prudhomme O'Brien, a GOP state representative from Rockingham, stood up feet from Clinton and began shouting. After Clinton dispatched the protestor once, O'Brien tried again during another lull in the program.

"You are very rude, and I'm not ever going to call on you," Clinton said forcefully, looking directly at the woman. "Thank you."

... after the event, the lawmaker said she was trying to ask the 2016 candidate about her husband's sexual impropriety decades ago.

"I asked her how in the world she can say that Juanita Broaddrick and Kathleen Willey are lying when she has no idea who Juanita Broaddrick is," O'Brien said. "She told me this summer she doesn't know who she is and doesn't want to know who she is. How can she assess that they are lying, which she told someone last month?"

O'Brien says she's a former Democrat who became a Republican precisely because of the stories about Bill Clinton's sex life:



But if you think O'Brien is just getting a brief fifteen minutes of fame and will soon be forgotten, please note that she's already a star of sorts on the right, and she's probably well enough known within the conservative infrastructure to be an ongoing problem for the Clinton campaign.

O'Brien confronted Al Gore in 1999 when he was running for president, asking him about the Broaddrick case. The confrontation was picked up by CNN and MSNBC as well as Fox, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and the Republican National Committee. (The RNC sent out a blas-fax transcript of the exchange.) In The Washington Times, Diane West wrote a column about the incident titled "Al Gore, Enabler." O'Brien said she was subsequently questioned by the IRS about her 1998 taxes; Judicial Watch claims to have successfully intervened on her behalf.

O'Brien became a member of Free Republic under the name KPfromDerryNH. She's communicated regularly with Free Republic about her encounters with Democratic (and occasionally Republican) politicians. In 2003 she confronted Howard Dean about a pregnant 12-year-old patient he'd had during his years as a practicing doctor. She confronted Hillary Clinton about the Broaddrick case in 2007, and told FR she was threatened with arrest. In 2007 she appeared on Fox's Hannity & Colmes, as well as on talk radio shows in Boston and Nashua, New Hampshire; she also gave a speech at a screening of an anti-Hillary documentary hosted by a Republican student group at Harvard.

In 2007, she also asked Rudy Giuliani why some of his own children weren't backing him for president, and she pressed Mitt Romney on his conversion from pro-choice to anti-abortion.

But she's remained focused on Clinton and the Broaddrick case. In 2008 she sent Hillary a copy of a tape of an NBC interview of Broaddrick, marked "return receipt requested"; she posted a copy of the receipt at Free Republic. She's confronted Clinton several times, most recently last month. Free Republic is always the first to be informed.

I think she's a big enough name on the right to be a constant presence throughout Clinton's candidacy (and presidency, if there is one). I don't think she's going away any time soon.